The Big Short Movie Ethics

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Recommended: The effect of the wall street crash

If you are ever interested in watching a movie involving some seriously flawed ethics, The Big Short is the one you want to watch. The storyline is as follows: In 2008, Wall Street guru Michael Burry (Christian Bale) realizes that a number of subprime home loans (A subprime mortgage is a type of loan granted to individuals with poor credit histories (often below 600), who, as a result of their deficient credit ratings, would not be able to qualify for conventional mortgages) are in danger of defaulting. Burry bets against the housing market by throwing more than one billion dollars into credit default swaps. His actions attract the attention of banker Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling), hedge-fund specialist Mark Baum (Steve Carell) and others. …show more content…

Unfortunately, everyone loses their moral compass to money; as most people do. One character that surprised me (especially since a lot of his movies drive me insane) was Brad Pitt’s character Ben Rickert. He plays an ex-trader who has abandoned Wall Street to hide out and learn to grow his own food while waiting for the world to collapse. It makes me wonder just how many more ex-traders are like that. I wonder how much knowledge they actually privileged to that us as regular civilians will never know about. One of the most profound things he said in the movie that really stuck with me was when he was speaking with two traders, who are on to “the big short.” The young guns are celebrating because they know they are going to make a bunch of money and Ben (Pitt) asks something along the lines of if they know how much suffering is going to be caused when this happens. He still helps them though, which really stuck with me because they all knew how much suffering this was going to cause to the larger population, but they didn’t care. They were all only concerned with money. I think it really speaks to the human condition and Darwin’s theory of survival of the fittest. Be the best or

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